The Father

Year 14, Day 170 - 6/19/22 - Movie #4,174

BEFORE: OK, last day of the Tribeca Film Festival, which means a 12-hour shift, including a pack-up and load-out, then a reset of the theater back to normal. I worked all weekend, but got off at 4 pm on Saturday, so I'd be fresh and awake for Sunday morning.  But then I had to spend the rest of Saturday catching up on TV shows, or else my TV DVR is going to get filled up.  Bottom line, I'm exhausted, but I'm not going to get a break until July, when the theater's closed for a month due to repairs. I know I should be looking for another part-time job to fill up my month, but honestly what seems really appealing is the notion of filing for partial unemployment for the month, and just catching up on sleep, because I'm way behind. 

Olivia Colman carries over from "The Lost Daughter". 

THE PLOT: A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even the fabric of his reality. 

AFTER: Normally I would issue a SPOILER ALERT here, to keep people who have not seen this film from learning what happens in it - however, since I'm not really sure what, exactly, was happening here, perhaps it's not necessary.  Just in case, if you haven't seen this film, and you don't want to learn what may or may not have been taking place here, then please, turn back now. 

If you're still with me, this is a film that is constantly changing - certain actors appear several times, under different names, and any facts that are established in the life or the surroundings of the lead character are to be taken with a grain of salt, because they may all change later on.  The goal, I believe, is to represent the mind-set of a man with dementia, because his memory has become unreliable, and thus the audience is put in a position similar to his, anything we think we know or remember from before is suspect. I see where they were going with this, however I think there's a big difference between forgetting things and mis-remembering them.  One is the absence of a memory that was there before, while the other is substituting new, false information in place of what's missing, and I'm not sure that's how dementia works.  Is it?

When we first see the old man, Anthony, his daughter, Anne, is visiting him in his apartment, and she's telling him that she's planning to move to Paris because she met a man, and she will visit him on weekends, but if he keeps acting up with his caregivers, then he'll need to move to a nursing home. This confuses Anthony a bit because he couldn't remember his daughter being in a relationship since her divorce from James, years ago.  

The next day, Anthony encounters an unfamiliar man in his apartment, who claims that he's Paul, Anne's husband, and Anthony lives in HIS apartment, not the other way around. Nearly everything in this encounter contradicts what was learned in the previous one, and then when Paul calls Anne to resolve the situation, she shows up, but she's a different woman.  

The next day, Anthony gets a new caregiver, who he says reminds him of his other daughter, Lucy, who he hasn't seen for a long time. The caregiver mentions Lucy's accident, which Anthony has no recollection of.  Then Anne comes home (played by the first actress again) and has an argument with her husband (played by a second actor) and this pattern pretty much continues for the rest of the film.  Anthony wakes up one time and walks down a hospital hallway, and later wakes up in a completely different bedroom, in a nursing home.  His nurse is played by the second actress who played his daughter, so WTF is really going on here? 

Well, there are a couple of possibilities here, but I'm probably over-complicating things.  The simplest answer is that only one of these realities is genuine, and the rest are comprised of incorrect information inside Anthony's head.  Perhaps his broken brain substituted his nurse's face for his daughters, or vice versa. Perhaps he can't recall whether his daughter's husband is Paul or James, and this is symbolized by the two names the character uses.  

Other possibilities: A) Parts of the film are a dream, or the whole film is a dream.  Many times I've dreamed about being in my parents house, or previous apartments, or living with my ex-wife, this might be very common. B) This could be a "Billy Pilgrim"-like situation, from the Kurt Vonnegut novel "Slaughterhouse Five", where Billy had become unstuck in time, and was experiencing the events of his life in a random order. How do any of us really know that one day comes after another, that we're living our lives in a linear fashion? Notice that every time Anthony finds himself in a different situation, it's right after waking up. Have you ever woken up and had to remind yourself what day, or week or year it is? C) This is just a movie showing us all these key events in Anthony's life, just not edited in a proper linear fashion.  Perhaps ALL of the information depicted is correct, just at different times.  or D) Perhaps Anthony has found a way to access the Multiverse, or the Anthony-Verse, and each time he wakes up, it's in the body of a different version of himself, from another dimension.  

My debate is whether this format is dirty pool, a form of "cheating" at scriptwriting because it's meant to confuse us, and at the same time it takes advantage of the fact that you CAN show a constantly shifting reality in a film, dates and times and names don't HAVE to be constants, but then, the follow-up observation is, even though you CAN mess with the laws of time and space in a film, it may not necessarily mean that you SHOULD.  Quite ironically, or perhaps appropriately, I was so tired while watching this that I kept falling asleep, and the effect when you fall asleep during a movie, then wake up and try to figure out what's going on and what you've missed, is (almost) exactly like what the lead character went through, each time he woke up - so I kind of got a double-dose, or an intensified effect here. 

And now, let's get personal, because my father is, like the main character here (maybe?) living in a home for elderly people - my mother's the one with dementia, though, and it's not getting any easier to have a rational conversation with her. My father still seems to have his wits about him, but since they moved to the new apartment in the facility, he's been focused on taking care of her, and sometimes neglecting his own needs in favor of hers.  My sister's been trying to impress upon him that he has to take care of himself first, in order to take care of her - if that means taking naps so he doesn't wear himself down, then that's what he has to do.  

I've spent a lot of years trying to not become my father - who worked for decades as a truck driver and spent most of his spare time working for the Catholic Church.  Since I broke my ties with the church long ago, and I avoided going into trucking myself, I basically spent a lot of years making sure I didn't turn into my father, personally or professionally.  He's really the kindest, most generous man I know, however he's also been known to exhibit an appalling lack of patience followed by fits of rage, and that's the part of him that I don't want to develop in myself.  But in the areas of home ownership and equipment repair, I've probably learned more from him than I'd care to admit.  In the past year I've gotten back into working in movie theaters, now managing one, and I can't help but think that my job now, opening and closing the theater, is a lot like the time he's spent opening and closing a church, running the services and maintaining the building. So I've circled back to following in his footsteps, in a way, except this time, I'm kind of OK with it.  This would mean that movies are basically my religion right now, and I'm kind of OK with that, too.

So, Happy Father's Day, Joe, and to all the fathers out there, of every age and every degree of mental capacity. But I'm afraid that history will remember the Academy Awards given out in 2021 for the following - in the Best Actor category, it was the most racially diverse group ever nominated, and Chadwick Boseman was expected to win posthumously, perhaps should have won, but the award went, once again, to the old white guy.  It's not for me to judge whether that was right or wrong, because I've only seen three out of the five nominated performances in that category. But out of the 8 Best Picture nominees for 2020, I've now seen 6 of them, having watched this one, "Mank" and "Judas and the Black Messiah" this month. (Just "Minari" and "Sound of Metal" to go...)

Also starring Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Spielberg"), Rufus Sewell (last seen in "Carrington"), Imogen Poots (last seen in "French Exit"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "An Education"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Locked Down"), Ayesha Dharker, Evie Wray (last seen in "Cruella"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 false accusations